Kate Williams is an assistant professor and a co-director of the Community Informatics Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Research note: Measuring the globalization of knowledge: The case of community informatics

Kate Williams, Noah Lenstra, Shameem Ahmed, Qiyuan Liu

Abstract

Freely accessible online, with a wide set of authors and a wider readership, First Monday can be seen as striving for global knowledge on the social aspects of the Internet. In a meta-analysis now underway, we found First Monday to be the third most prolific journal on a particular subject: local communities’ uses of information technology. Our study also sheds some light on what constitutes global knowledge. The data suggests that a synthesis of English-language published knowledge is a first step. It points to a bigger agenda: reaching into the world’s local settings in a proportionate and representative way. That would mean publishers outside the U.S. and U.K.; scholars in other countries; and studies in other languages. This is what it would take to learn from all our cultures and countries.